I had a conversation with my aunt a couple weeks ago about my premature apprehension for the future process of finding someone to fall in love with, marry and spend the rest of my life with.

The question was: “How can you ever know if the person you’re in love with is going to want to stay with you through everything?” The idea of divorce is an irrational fear I’ve developed recently after being in two longterm relationships. I also have a lot of friends that made the decision to get married during college or right after high school and the thought of that back then terrified me.
I’m not here to knock that lifestyle choice at all – I’ve never wished for anything but prosperity for everyone getting engaged, or married. But for me personally, perhaps because the only true time that I looked at spending my life with someone ended because she cheated on me.

I also had a conversation with a friend just the other night about the disgusting reality of relationships these days. People come, people go. Friends walk in and out of our lives like travelers renting hotel rooms. The worst part is that they don’t tidy the room before leaving. Because the housekeeper is used to cleaning that stuff up, right? She’s been doing it forever.

That’s how it feels sometimes. Sometimes I feel like the housekeeper left to clean up after a group of unruly kids threw a mini prom after-party in suite 402. You think you know someone well enough to trust them with your heart and soul. But 6 weeks or 3 years later, you’re hit in the face with the stench of stale, spilt beer, fly-infested pizza remains and a broken friendship you trusted would last for years. But regardless of how miserable we are, we’re forced to pick up the pieces and keep moving forward, accepting the phrase: “You don’t know what’s going on inside their head.”

And seriously – How can you ever know if the person you’re in love with is going to want to stay with you forever? I think the answer my aunt and I came up with was a simple, yet frustrating one: You can’t. You can’t know.

I think the most profound realization my friend and I came to the other night while throwing around phrases like, “Sometimes I think you never truly know a person,” and “You think you know someone and then they prove you wrong,” was something he said that I think we could both agree on:
“I don’t even know who I am.”

And that’s just it.

At 15, I would’ve told you that, as a 21 year old junior in college, I’d have myself figured out. I met her when I was just a babe of 24 years old. It was a blind date. I wasn’t interested in her in any way other than friendship. I left the party because the feelings of awkwardness were overwhelming. She was 29 and already an adult, experienced, very experienced. I had yet to have my first “experience.” I also came with healing and trauma that I feared sharing with her.

She called me a few days later and we started spending time together. We became friends. When she invited me to go to Europe for a week with her and her closest friends, I had to decline because of school but something happened during that time apart from her.

I missed her.

I’ll never forget the day that I picked her up. She kissed me and it was as if the stars made wishes on our kiss. She became my everything. She was the very first person that I truly opened my heart up to about the heartache Stephen left me with. I let her in completely and she let me in her heart, too. We made plans, big plans for the future. Marriage, kids, my practice. We bought a home together and started living our dream.

Then it happened. She cheated on me and basically shut my heart down for business.

It took me nine years to realize that the two relationships that followed her suffered in some way because of the broken heart that I was still carrying around all of those years.

I never fully trusted anyone. I pretended to. I pretended to share everything, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I did love with my entire heart, as much of it as I could but there were always barriers in the way.

I never realized how much that pain interfered with my life until tragedy struck last year and I had to start fighting for my sanity. It was then that I realized just how lost I had become.

I was basically a shell with a heartbeat.

I yearned so much for love that I became the girl with many faces. I adapted to the environment that my partners enjoyed. I never gave cause for altercations, nor did I have a mind of my own. I enjoyed their taste in music, their hobbies, their wants & desires became my wants & desires.

Somehow I lead myself to believe that this was love with each relationship but in all honestly, they didn’t even know me, because I didn’t know myself.

People I thought would spend a significant amount of time in my life are racing in and out and there’s no way to stop it. The worst part about it, is that it’s an epidemic. I had a “me too”-heavy conversation with a friend and I’m convinced, if she’s experiencing the same things, then so are so many others.
And why?
Because we think we know someone. We think we can know someone well enough to trust them with our everything. We put pieces of our hearts in the palms of their hands and believe them whole-heartedly when they say they’ll keep it safe. It’s all based on the intangible idea of trust and…isn’t that a little scary?

It’s like the saying, “you can’t love someone until you love yourself.”
I truly believe you can’t ever know anyone until you know yourself.
But there’s the catch – we’re always progressing. We’re constantly figuring ourselves out.

Does it bother me?
Yeah. I don’t think I’d be sitting here hovered over a laptop at 12:30 in the morning writing hundreds of words about it if it didn’t bother me. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I think the trick is to just continue soul-searching. Continue finding the things you’re passionate about and continue loving the people you want to love and spending time with the people you want to spend time with. If one happens to fall through the cracks, yeah, it will inevitably always suck. But the more we know ourselves, the less it will suck when someone we care about writes the end of our co-authored book way before we expected, or way before we wanted.

I think the most important thing is to just keep loving, keep trusting, and keep hoping things will fall into place. The biggest comforter for me is trusting that everything is a learning experience and maybe it’s happening for a greater reason than I’ll ever realize.

“I don’t even know who I am but I am learning more and more everyday.”

Neither does anyone else. But maybe we can find comfort in knowing there’s at least one thing we all have in common.

JMS